I set quill to page beneath a guttering wick and offer what little of myself prudence allows.
For nearly eighty-four Terran years I have worn the robes of the Ecclesiarchy and served loyally, though not always without doubt, the undying will of the God-Emperor. I have trod the dust of shrine-worlds and the rusted decks of void-ships. I have heard the hymns of saints and the howls of heretics. Faces of the faithful and the faithless alike have passed before me, each a shard of the Imperium’s vast and unyielding mosaic.
Yet as age bows my frame and the long night of silence draws near, my thoughts return to a secret long buried. In the fervent days of my youth, when I was but a humble scribe among endless stacks of sanctioned scripture, I uncovered a manuscript hidden behind forgotten reliquaries, a relic of belief older than the War of Apostasy. Its words whispered of virtue and sin not as decrees from the Throne but as choices of the mortal soul. Such pages would earn a pyre in any cathedral of our age.
By the trembling light of a single candle I devoured those vellum sheets, fearing each footstep of the Deacon who might discover me. Decades have dimmed their precise verses, yet the lessons endured, etched into the marrow of my life. Again and again the galaxy itself became my tutor, confirming that the Emperor’s purpose may reach beyond mere survival of His Imperium.
I will not betray the exact phrasing of those outlawed lines, for memory fails and caution restrains, but I will recount the journeys through which their truths revealed themselves.
My given name I shall keep veiled, for discretion is the only shield left to me.
You may, if you wish, call me the Friar.